


Time Space Tactics

by El Staplador (elstaplador)



Category: Dragonfly - Blondie (Song)
Genre: Gen, IN SPACE!, Multi, Racing, Spaceships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2019-05-14 12:45:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14769896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elstaplador/pseuds/El%20Staplador
Summary: The Grande Trex is a long, hard, race. It takes so much out of the mind and body that, for all that it's an annual event (in Earth years, that is) nobody gets more than a couple of goes at it.This would be Spark's third attempt.





	Time Space Tactics

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Irusu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Irusu/gifts).



It was pure coincidence, not that Spark ever told them that. _Dragonfly_ was named before ever she had the thought of going for sponsorship from the Dragon Corporation. _Dragonfly_ could never have been anything else, not with that long, elegant body, that shimmering green paint.

That was before I came on the scene, too, before I met Cleppy in a bar on Europa and fell for her bubbling laugh and her green eyes and the nonchalant, knowledgeable way she dissected the chances of all the competitors. Before Spark mentioned to Cleppy that she was going to enter the Grande Trex, on her own account this time, and that she needed a co-pilot and a photographer and a navigator.

  
It takes a while to get a ship into the Grande Trex. Long enough for Cleppy to get her navigator's qualification. Long enough for the pair of us to get married. (Cleppy needed her citizenship, but we'd have done it anyway, sooner or later.) Long enough for me to prove to Spark that I was a decent pilot. (She didn't believe the super-license, and the vids from my Trex Two career weren't good enough either. We did three circuits of the old Solar System before she was satisfied.) Long enough for my conviction on B'Arc to quietly expire. Long enough for Spark to talk the Dragon Corporation into backing her and her beloved ship. Long enough to get a support crew together. (Parrta, who persuaded Dragon that it would be good for his development, and Ute, who'd worked with Spark before, and a whole team of mechs and astros and techs.)

Long enough for Spark to learn to trust me with Cleppy. (Cleppy said she didn't care, really, but I was more sure that she'd have missed Spark than I was that she'd have chosen me, if it came to it.) And all the while the process rolled on, and we waited to hear whether it would be next year's Grande Trex, or the year after, or never.

The day the news came through, Spark called Cleppy, and, when Cleppy got out of the lab, she called me, and we went out together to drink to the good news and compose the press release. And it was good news. It was something that all three of us had wanted for a long time, one way or another, and it took some of the sting out of the disappointment when the lab results came back.

'Maybe it's just as well,' Cleppy said to me.

'Maybe things will have changed by the time we get back,' I said to her.

Because the Grande Trex is a long, hard, race. It takes so much out of the mind and body that, for all that it's an annual event (in Earth years, that is) nobody gets more than a couple of goes at it.

This would be Spark's third attempt. The first time she'd barely been out of her teens. She'd been co-pilot on _Emperor Zosia_ – yes, _that_ _Emperor Zosia_ , Rox Dellaro's ship – and they'd pulled her out of the wreckage around Kornfeld's Comet, a bare fifty thousand kilometres into the race.

'So really,' Spark said, 'it hardly counts as an attempt.'

She never talked about Rox.

The second time she'd been with Bouldnor on _Dauntless_ , and they'd crawled in a dismal fifty-eighth, six months behind _Haraka_ and the rest of the pack.

This time, she was here to win.

  
We formed up on the planet they now call 'Grande Trex' – seventy-nine craft, of all shapes and sizes. There was the squat, assertive bulk of _L'Indomitable_ ; there were the sweeping curves of _Ether_ ; there was the sleek, shining _Zydel_. In fact, I'd been around the spacerace scene long enough to know all of them by sight: some from the broadcasts, some from real life. I'd raced against a couple of them, and had even been crew on _Associated Terraforming_ when it was called _GalaxyBreaks_ and flew in the Betelgeuse Sprint. The Grande Trex was a different matter entirely, and I wondered what sort of modifications Loretta had made to compensate.

But I didn't have time to think about other people's ships. We had our own launch to worry about. _Dragonfly_ 's soundproofing was excellent, and we were all three of us wearing our hearing defenders. Even so, the roar of those seventy-nine sets of engines filled the control room. The excited chittering of the commentary was comprehensible only in the form of subtitles racing across the bottom of the screen. I had my eyes fixed on it, waiting for the moment when the lights would turn green. Spark was watching it too, and she had the palms of her hands flat against the control panel, checking the engine note by the vibrations. Cleppy was crouched over the camera console, flicking through each feed in turn.

 _Green_. Spark moved her left hand to the blast button. I let my fingers rest lightly on the steering handle. Grip too hard, and our race would be over before it began. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Spark's lips move in the countdown. _Four... three... two... one..._

_Double green._

_Two... one..._

And the lights were out, and Spark had flicked the blast and power was surging through _Dragonfly_ , through my hands, and we were speeding down the launch lane and on, on, into the blackness beyond. I was aware of the ships around us, either side, fanning outwards, upwards, all of us finding our own space. The lurid glare of the launch lane was suddenly only a glimmer.

A jolt. We felt it; we couldn't hear it. I swore, inaudibly.

 _What was that?_ I mouthed at Spark.

 _Some bastard hit us_ , she replied.

The roaring had stopped, I realised. I pulled my hearing defenders off.

Spark switched the blast regulator to automatic. 'Some bastard hit us,' she repeated, a little too loudly. 'Keep the steering. I'm going to look.'

If I looked back over my left shoulder I could see a little cloud of debris swirling around outside the nearest porthole. Not all of it was shimmering green, but some of it was. 'Aye, aye.'

Cleppy, meanwhile, was on the comm to base. 'Did you see that? What's the damage?'

There was a longwinded crackle that seemed to make sense to her, because she said, 'Well, report it. I'll get the captain to authorise it in a minute.'

She came and perched next to me on Spark's seat. 'It was the _Tomasola_. Parrta thinks they got the worst of it, but they're out of sight now.'

'Incompetence, or malice?'

'Parrta didn't offer an opinion on that,' Cleppy said.

'Hm,' I said. It had felt like malice to me.

  
Spark, when she returned having found little more than cosmetic damage, took the opposite view; but then she valued competence highly, and assumed that the majority of the universal population didn't possess much of it. ' _Tomasola_?' she said. 'That's Lat McHapa, isn't it? They never could remember to check their upward blind spot. Should have had their license revoked years ago.' Her face set in a little frown. She was not inclined to overlook McHapa's action even if she did not believe it to have been intended personally.

'We're losing time,' I said. 'I've seen at least two craft pass us.'

'Four,' Cleppy said.

'Fuck,' Spark said, as if that were the next number after four. 'It couldn't be helped, though.'

That was true. We couldn't have switched the blast off auto until we knew the extent of the damage. I asked, 'You're happy to go back on manual?'

She glanced at me and gave a tiny nod. 'You can take the blast control.'

I surrendered the steering to her, knowing that this was, in its way, an expression of approval. It wasn't that she didn't trust me with the steering; it was that she did trust me with the blast, the more delicate function. It didn't mean so much now that the race had opened out a little, but it meant something.

(It had taken Cleppy, who had learned all this kind of thing the hard way, some time to explain to me that this was how Spark worked. Now I knew, it wasn't so difficult to decipher.)

' _Sakura_ is ahead of us,' I said, 'and _Sir Juliet_. I'd know that blue tailwing anywhere.'

Spark frowned. ' _Sakura_ 's ahead? That's bad. They're the slowest starter out there.'

'That's an exaggeration,' Cleppy said.

I shook my head. 'Not much of one. And they're definitely the fastest finisher.'

Spark sighed. 'We'd better get after them, then, hadn't we? Cleppy?'

'Course plotted for the Deradulian system, captain.'

'Great. Dawe?'

'On it.'

'Good. Let's go.'

  
We settled into a smooth run towards Deradulia, catching and passing _Sir Juliet_ and _Zydel_ and accelerating all the time. Nothing of particular interest happened for the next forty-five thousand kilometres. Spark and I took turns to eat and sleep, and Cleppy let the cameras run, and checked the course every few hours.

I had gone for a brisk walk back and forth along the length of the ship, grabbing drink refills for all of us on the way, when a transmission came in.

Cleppy listened, said, 'Please repeat?' a few times, and then took the conversation off to the navigation room.

Spark and I glanced at each other, disquieted. Cleppy is my espoused partner, and Spark has known her longer than I have, and we both know when something isn't quite right. Still, there wasn't much we could do until she came back. Which she did, only a few minutes later. She wasn't running – Cleppy never ran in space – but she was in a hurry. 'Captain,' she said, 'there's a problem.'

Spark unwrapped a supercaff humbug one-handed and popped it into her mouth. 'What is it?'

'We can't enter Deradulic space. Dragon have got some kind of dispute going on with the planetary government over broadcasting rights and they're not allowed to display anything with the name on it. And us flying through the system counts as displaying.'

'So turn off the sponsor panel.'

Cleppy shook her head. 'That still leaves the name.'

'The name?'

' _Dragonfly_. Dragon. Fly.'

Spark exhaled loudly. 'You're fucking kidding me. We're a licensed entrant into the Grande Trex. Therefore we should be allowed to follow the Grande Trex racetrack, whatever we're called, whatever space it runs through.'

'I said all that,' Cleppy told her.

'Why didn't Parrta tell us this before we set out?' I asked.

'The issue hadn't arisen then.' Cleppy shrugged.

Spark crunched the rest of the humbug, and, frowning at the front screen. 'So,' she said.

'We could cover up the nameplate,' I suggested.

I knew Spark wouldn't like that, and she didn't. 'Over my dead body,' she said.

'We'd be disqualified, anyway,' Cleppy said. 'The regs say that we have to display the name of our craft at all times.' She glanced at me. 'And they also say that we can't change the name we registered under, just in case you were thinking of suggesting that.'

I hadn't been, though it struck me as a good idea now. 'What do we do, then?'

'Put in a protest,' Spark said.

'I already did,' said Cleppy. 'At least, I drafted it. It's waiting for your approval.'

Spark jabbed at the comms screen until the document flashed up, and pressed her thumb into the bottom corner to authorise it. 'Fuck the Deradulans. Fuck Dragon. I wish I'd been able to fund this myself. You don't see Madi Mansour having this kind of problem, do you?'

Madi Monsour was the owner and captain of _Ether_ , and seemed to be bent on demonstrating the truism that the way to make a small fortune Grande Trex racing was to start with a large one. And it was true: he was not having this kind of problem. _Ether_ was coming up on our starboard side, its whole back panel flashing yellow to indicate that it was preparing to begin the wide curving manoeuvre that would put it into the Deradulan system.

I glanced at Cleppy; she wasn't looking worried, but then she never did.

Spark said, 'We can just about squeeze round the edge of Deradulic space, can't we?'

'Just about,' Cleppy agreed. 'If we keep to the far side of Pondrán and then cut straight back in at the checkpoint.'

It was just like her to have worked it out already. It was just like Spark to know she would have done.

'Yes,' Spark said. 'That makes sense to me. But we'll have to pull a Powell to get there from here. And we'll have to do it now.' She nodded at me. 'Dawe?'

I was already sliding into the seat next to her. The Powell Manoeuvre was going to need both of us, and all of our hands.

'Hold tight,' Spark said.

She blew a fast, intense burn on the blast, while I held the steering as far back as it would go, then cut out everything and lent her weight to the sharp anti-clockwise turn that I made. We'd done this in practice, but we'd never been going so far or so fast, and my whole body was screaming at the wrongness of it. Spark gave the ship half a second to stabilise, then ran the blast again, while I held the steering in place.

'Now.'

I swung it hard over to the other side while Spark doubled the blast. The ship screamed and whined, and spun in a rapid corkscrew up and away from the racing line. At Spark's nod, I let go of the steering to let it find its own neutral position. She let the blast out in a series of increasingly gentle pulses, and we settled into the new direction.

Cleppy was there immediately, making a couple of adjustments to the updated course. I blinked at the front screen, watching a new configuration of stars unfold before us. Far below, _L'Indomitable_ slipped past. Spark laid her hand on the blast panel. 'You beauty,' she said. 'You absolute beauty.'

  
Someone did a study on racers' brains once, and they found not what they were expecting, that racers use more of our brains than anybody else does theirs, but that we use about the same amount, more efficiently. This was on humans, you understand; I don't know about other species. But however much of your brain you're using, however efficiently you're using it, you can't do it all the time. You need to sleep; you need to relax. You can't ever forget that you're racing, but if you're in race mode all the time then things tend to end badly.

When it's a really long race, and when two (or more) crew members have any sort of arrangement... well, every captain handles that question in their own way. With me and Cleppy, Spark managed to convey the impression that she knew, and that she approved, but that she didn't really want to know, if you see what I mean. She was a bit squeamish about the whole thing, really.

What I am trying to get at here is that once we'd got around Pondrán and made sure that the checkpoint had registered us, Spark packed me and Cleppy off to bed. 'Go on, you two. I want one of you back to take over in six hours, but I'm quite happy on my own until then. There's nothing between here and the Buafsem system.'

I grinned. 'Captain.'

'Make it me,' Cleppy said. 'And five hours. I'd like to double check all the camera kit ready for the approach to Buafsem.'

She didn't pause for disagreement either from Spark or from me. As for me, I followed without a word and let her lead me down to the cabin.

And this was everything I'd ever wanted: to be lost in this ever-extending moment, and the faint sheen on Cleppy's skin, and the little gasping sounds she was making, and the vast, soft, grounding hum that was _Dragonfly_ hurtling forwards through emptiness.

  
I woke alone. Looked up, checked the shipboard time. There was a good hour to go before I relieved Spark, and, so far as I could tell, everything was as it should be. Nothing unusual, nothing out of place. Nothing strange at all until I walked into the control room and discovered that both my captain and my espoused partner were staring at me in a distinctly hostile manner.

'Is anything wrong?' I asked.

'Were you ever going to tell me,' Spark inquired icily, 'about the little matter of your police record?'

'How did you find out?' That was probably the least clever thing I could have said, but we can't all be models of wit in times of crisis.

Cleppy didn't say anything; she didn't even look particularly upset; but her silence was telling in itself. My heart sank.

It was Spark who said, 'It came up on the confirmation of the crew paperwork for the entry into the B'Arc system.'

'Is it going to cause a problem?'

'They're letting us through, if that's what you mean. They don't consider your conviction relevant.'

I wasn't quite brave enough to say, But you do? Anyway, I already knew the answer. I inclined my head. 'I'd like to apologise, Captain, for not having disclosed it.'

Spark snorted. 'Were we on planet, of course, I'd dismiss you. As things stand –' She shook her head. 'I can fly this ship by myself, if it comes to it.'

I looked at Cleppy for support, but she wouldn't look at me, and by the time I'd turned back to speak to Spark there was nothing but the door sliding shut.

'I'm sorry,' I said.

Cleppy didn't say anything.

'It was a long time ago.'

'You'd forgotten all about it, I suppose,' Cleppy said, with less sarcasm than someone from Earth would have used. 'You stole a huge amount of money and forgot all about it.'

'Of course I didn't forget about it. You don't forget about something like that.' I couldn't stop myself adding, 'Of course, you wouldn't know.'

Cleppy turned away. 'No,' she said.

'Out of interest,' I asked, 'who was monitoring communications when this transmission came through?'

Cleppy said, as innocently as you like, 'I was, of course.'

I'd known when I married her that she wouldn't lie for anyone, not even me. I wasn't sure she was even capable of it. As for expecting her to lie to Spark, even to omit certain portions of the truth from Spark, that was out of the question. All the same, I couldn't quell a surge of resentment. 'Cleppy –' I said.

'There isn't time,' she said. 'We'll be in the Buafsem system in thirty minutes.'

Spark really would kick me out into the vacuum if I distracted Cleppy during the photographic pass. 'Right,' I said. 'Sorry.'

I took my seat and began preparing for the computer override. Cleppy was right. We had a race to finish. And this seemed to be the attitude that Spark was taking, too: she re-entered the control room with an armful of cable cords and started disconnecting the automatic route program from the steering module. 'Move your left leg, there, Dawe,' she said, as if nothing was wrong.

Well, of course she did. You simply can't afford to lose concentration during a computer override. You have to be the computer; you don't have room for anger or regret or shame. I was already immersed in the dimensional equations; I didn't even have room to be surprised by Spark's nonchalance.

The next three hours were intense. We flicked the override just as Jonrin 22 came into sight in the front screen. Suddenly the sky seemed very crowded after our long, lonely diversion past Pondrán. The mandatory route through the Buafsem system made a bottleneck in any case. Fortunately, we were ahead of most of them; only _Sakura_ and _L'Indomitable_ were in front of us. But we couldn't ever forget that every single craft round here was on manual. Any tiny mistake that any pilot made could kill them, and anyone else in the vicinity, too.

Cleppy looked up from one of the camera screens and said, suddenly, 'Can we go round the dark side?'

'It'll put us behind,' Spark said through her teeth.

'I know. It'll find us some more space, though.'

Spark finished another program check before she said, 'We don't need more space.'

I wouldn't have minded some more space, actually – _Zydel_ was uncomfortably close – but I didn't interfere.

'Nobody's ever got photographs from the dark side.'

Now Spark was interested. 'Why not, and what makes us different?'

'They never got sufficiently close in to get a decent shot.'

' _Dragonfly_ can go very low,' Spark said, thoughtfully.

'Yes,' Cleppy said.

It was a risk. As things stood at the moment, we were in a position to win on distance. If we went the long way round Jonrin 22 then we'd lose that advantage. But if Cleppy thought that she could make that up on points from the photographs, then it was probably worth a shot.

'It's going to be horribly close,' Spark said.

Cleppy nodded.

'You've got the route worked out, of course.'

She nodded again.

'Dawe? Any thoughts?'

I shrugged my shoulders. 'You're the captain.'

She was silent for a couple of seconds. Then, 'We'll do it,' she said. 'Stand by to drop in seven minutes.'

We set the new course, signalled, and peeled off the racing line, heading down towards the dark side of Jonrin 22.

Above us, there was a horrible flash and glare that had to be somebody getting the entry into the atmosphere wrong. Fatally wrong. I thought it might have been Loretta. I didn't let myself think about it.

  
Cleppy, busy with the cameras, hadn't said a word in a good hour. I could only hope that she was getting some good shots. Certainly we were giving her the best possible chance: plunging down into the oceans, sweeping across the frozen deserts, basking in the eerie glow that rose from the swamps and watching the exhilarated faces of the citizens as we passed over their heads. If she'd captured even a tenth of what we saw, I thought, we could climb out here and win the whole thing on photo points.

Spark took us on a loop around the planet's second moon for good measure, and we cut across the edge of the system and cut the override before rejoining the course just ahead of _Ether_.

'Well?' Spark asked, when all the systems were back online? 'Was it worth it?'

Cleppy seemed happy. 'I think so. I'll have to run over all the footage of course, but I think so.'

'I only hope you're right. Well. On to B'Arc.'

  
B'Arc was, I thought, a thoroughly boring system, and I couldn't see why they'd added it to the course. If they wanted distance, then Lorenzo's Comet would have given them that, and it was prettier, too. But there we were: it was part of the course, and we had to go there.

I felt even less charitable towards it when we slipped a gyroscope bearing and had to take everything offline to fix it safely. That put us a long way behind the leaders, and, worse, we had to get off the racing line and go into orbit around an insignificant little moon. Spark was, I think, less patient than me, but she hid it better. At long, long, last we got it fixed and got out of there, heading out into space. If we put the front screen onto maximum zoom we could just about see _Zydel_ out ahead.

'We're back on track,' I said, but just as I did there came a bang that shuddered and reverberated through the ship. I grabbed at the sides of my chair, and half turned round – to see Spark huddled against the wall, her body limp.

'What on earth was that?' Cleppy exclaimed. 'There wasn't any warning.'

'Never mind that,' I said. 'What about Spark?'

The ship was still shaking, violently enough to make anyone lose their footing. Cleppy pulled herself up from her seat and worked her way around the edge of the control room until she reached Spark. 'Breathing,' she reported. 'Captain? Spark, can you hear me?'

No answer.

'Her head?'

There was a lot of blood, but I knew that was to be expected with head wounds. An alarm wailed, and I had to turn back to the console to work out what it was and whether I could shut it off.

When I looked back, Cleppy had got Spark lying on her side and hooked up to the medlines. I hoped that she was sufficiently unconscious not to notice the discomfort.

'I think it must have been a space mine,' Cleppy said. 'Because there was nothing at all on the screen before we hit.'

'We're lucky to still be flying, in that case.'

'It'll be hundreds of years old, and not so potent as it was.'

'I thought they were meant to have cleared the minefields.' I set a scan going. I'd have preferred to look at the damage myself, but somebody had to keep the ship flying. 'What do we do now?' I asked. 'I suppose it depends on what the damage is.' To the ship, I meant, but also to Spark.

'The captain won't want us to concede,' said Cleppy. 'Not unless we have to.'

'Officially,' I said, 'we should pull over and get medical attention to her.'

'I know.' She sounded unhappy.

'It'll take forever to get here,' I said. 'We're surely the fastest thing within twenty thousand kilometres. We might as well take her to the medics as to ask the medics to come to her.'

The computer intoned, _Scan completed_. I glanced at the report. We'd lost the end of a fin, but that was it.

'What does it say?' Cleppy asked.

'We could go on.'

'Should we go on?'

I drew a breath. 'Cleppy,' I said, 'I'm deferring to you. You know what Spark would tell you, better than I do.'

'I don't think that's true,' Cleppy said. 'But it doesn't matter either way. We go on.'

  
We went on. The medlines hummed and blinked, and we could only trust that they were doing what they were meant to. Meanwhile, I programmed in the course that Cleppy set for me, and gave the engines as much as I dared. We passed _L'Indomitable_. We passed _Sir Juliet_. We heard that _Sakura_ was coming up behind us, and that _Ether_ had crashed.

And all that we could do was keep on and on, and hope that Spark would come round.

  
'Dawe?' Cleppy said, several hours later.

'Yes?'

'Can you tell me why you stole that money?'

'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'

She laughed, and that was a good sign. 'Why did it seem like a good idea?'

'Well...' I said. 'I suppose it's quite a good story, if you're not in the middle of it.' And I told her.

I was desperate. I'd got on the wrong side of a feud back home on Hecuba, and there were more people than I liked to think about who wanted to kill me. I fled to Buaret, the chief city of the B'Arc system, but I found out within a couple of months that I'd been followed. The business I'd robbed from hadn't been anything to do with any of that; it had just been the most obvious way to raise the funds to get away. If I'm honest, it was a relief to be caught. There are few places in the galaxy so secure as a B'Arc jail. Who cared if I couldn't get out? Nobody could get in, either.

And by the time they let me out, the feud had burned itself out, and all I had to do was rebuild my life from the planetary crust upwards. And thank goodness I met Loretta, who wasn't fussy about her pilots' past.

'She's gone,' Cleppy said. 'There was a crash just before Jonrin 22.' She added, as an afterthought, 'I'm sorry.'

I nodded. 'I thought I saw that. I wish I'd... But what could we have done? All the same, I owe Loretta a lot.'

'Why didn't you tell me about it all?'

'Because you'd have told Spark, of course.'

Cleppy accepted that. 'I suppose I would have done.'

'And she'd never have let me talk to you again.'

She frowned. 'Spark thinks she has to look after me because I'm Averlan, doesn't she? And so do you.'

'Yes,' I said. 'Probably.'

She sighed. 'I wish you wouldn't. I wish you'd tell me things.'

'I'm sorry,' I said.

She nodded, patted Spark gently on the wrist, and came over to me and kissed me gently. 'Tell me next time.'

  
Spark woke up somewhere around Ghummer. She blinked a couple of times. 'Cleppy.' Her eyes flicked left and right, and she saw me. 'Dawe.'

'Captain,' we said.

'How long have I been out? How's the race?'

Cleppy said, 'We thought you wouldn't want us to give up.'

'Damn straight I wouldn't. Did you?'

I said, 'No.'

'So where are we?'

'There's nobody else within ten thousand kilometres of us. It's us or _Sakura_.'

Spark laughed. 'Dawe,' she said, 'you may be a thief. You may be all sorts of things. But you're my co-pilot and you're staying that way.'

I wondered how much she'd heard when Cleppy and I were talking.

'Captain,' Cleppy said, 'I need to ask you, now that you're conscious. Do you wish to stop for medical treatment?'

'No, Cleppy, I don't. We keep on. Thank you.'

After a couple of seconds, Cleppy laughed, too.

  
We went on in that way for the next few days of shiptime. We didn't want to leave Spark alone, so for most of the time she and Cleppy took their shifts together, and I relieved them for a shift on my own. Four hours on, four hours off. We pushed on, further, faster. We passed C'Clator without stopping, which I felt guilty about. That would have been the place to get Spark treated, but we'd have lost time. And she absolutely refused to let us stop. Not while _Sakura_ was there in our rear screen.

 _Sakura_ – such a deceptive name for such a fast ship. This was no flower petal drifting on the breeze; this was sustained power and speed. It had been slow in the qualifying dash; it had been sluggish off the line; but over the length of the Grande Trex course it had found the space to build its speed. Add to that Navigator Ahmed's infamous genius when it came to working with gravity, and _Sakura_ was a formidable opponent.

And it was closing on us fast as we approached the finish.

I was aware all the time of _Sakura_ close up on our right wing, just the far side of dangerous, and I knew that I could trust Kobayashi to hold their line, just as they could trust me to hold ours. Spark had her eyes fixed on the screen, and she was pulling out everything that _Dragonfly_ had.

She was never going to get a better chance than this, and we all knew it.

 _Sakura_ and _Dragonfly_ sped towards the line side by side, as if we were dance partners rather than rivals. They pulled ahead – and Spark coaxed something more from the blast – we surged forward – and the line was coming closer and closer, a great red band stretched across the screen, which signified the edge of the Grande Trex atmosphere and the end of the race. _Sakura_ was there at our shoulder again.

I could have sworn that we were a metre ahead when we crossed the barrier. Racers being what they are, I expect Kobayashi would have done, too. The officials would be analysing the line footage now. But it didn't matter.

'We've got it,' Spark was saying as she flicked the series of switches that initiated Spiral Landing procedure. 'We've got it on photo points.'

Cleppy, who doesn't understand or indulge in false modesty, thought about it for a second and then nodded. 'I don't think Hartfield can have got anything as good.'

'He can't.'

  
And he hadn't. We knew it the moment we stepped off _Dragonfly_ and the reporters surged towards us. Cleppy's best shot – a huge sea mammal, photographed from below, glowing with phosphorescence – was projected onto the big screen on the finish line, with the words _Dragonfly – Grande Trex Winner_ superimposed on the expanse of water.

'Thank you,' was all that Spark could say. 'Thank you, Cleppy; thank you, Dawe. Thank you for –'

But she didn't finish that. From behind us, there came an ominous hissing and crackling. We turned around, and that was when the explosion came.

There was nothing we could do. We could only watch as _Dragonfly_ 's engines blew themselves out one by one, and the flames leapt out from inside the shell.

I couldn't hear Spark's words, but I saw her lips move. _You beauty_ , she said. _You beauty_.


End file.
